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Sunday, October 2, 2016

Trump Tax Records Show He Could Have Avoided Taxes for Nearly Two Decades, The Times Found

Donald J. Trump
declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax
deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid
paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years, records obtained by
The New York Times show.

The
1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax
benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived
from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through
mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into
the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.

Tax
experts hired by The Times to analyze Mr. Trump’s 1995 records said
that tax rules especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have
allowed Mr. Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an
equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period.

Although
Mr. Trump’s taxable income in subsequent years is as yet unknown, a
$916 million loss in 1995 would have been large enough to wipe out more
than $50 million a year in taxable income over 18 years.

The $916 million loss certainly could have eliminated any federal income taxes Mr. Trump otherwise would have owed on the $50,000 to $100,000 he was paid for each episode of “The Apprentice,”
or the roughly $45 million he was paid between 1995 and 2009 when he
was chairman or chief executive of the publicly traded company he
created to assume ownership of his troubled Atlantic City casinos.
Ordinary investors in the new company, meanwhile, saw the value of their
shares plunge to 17 cents from $35.50, while scores of contractors went
unpaid for work on Mr. Trump’s casinos and casino bondholders received
pennies on the dollar. (New York Times, full story here)